HALO 3: Leg-END-ary

posted by Jaitu at 21:37

Finally the fight is finished. Earlier this week TechMaster and I put in around five hours to finish up the Legendary Halo3 Campaign. From an achievement point of view there are only five points between us (I have one extra achievement). Aside from the remaining 'Skulls' there are very few left to get that do not involve the online multiplayer modes. I intend to go back in on a casual setting to try and pick up the skulls but for now my attention has wandered elsewhere.

A Weekend Of Restarts And Do-Overs: Halo3, Dead Space, Pinball FX

posted by Jaitu at 07:49

This weekend had a definite feeling of 'again-ness' to it. Quite apart from spending a sizable chunk of it putting glass back into places the previous owners of our house had removed it from; re-painting a wall that has seen four different colours in the few years we've been living here; climbing a ladder in the conservatory to tidy paint work (something I have done too many times to count recently); and, finally, scratching myself to pieces while constructing our artificial Christmas Tree for the fourth or fifth time in about as many years. The last couple of days gaming has also been of an 'again' nature.

Dead Space.
In the last post I discovered that the Dead Space achievement for completing the game on the hardest difficulty could not be gained by simply choosing the hardest difficulty and piling in. The truly hardest difficulty is not available as an option until you complete the game for the first time. So having struggled my way to chapter five of twelve I decided to give up on the campaign and begin again on easy. My aim now is to play through to the end, picking up as many achievements as I can along the way. I'm already not far from where I left off. Once I'm given the option for the 'Impossible Mode' I'll start a game of it and save a checkpoint so that I can return later. Then, I'll go back to the last save of the Easy campaign and finish it again. The reason for that is you can then begin the campaign on easy a second time but with all the resources you have collected on the first play through. This is in order to tidy up the other achievements which cannot be done on a single play through. The Impossible mission can wait for a time in the future when I wish to torture myself - a time that may never come.

Halo 3.
Techmaster and I continued our Legendary Halo 3 campaign yesterday. We managed to tick off 'The Ark' but in truth we could probably have completed another chapter as well if we had made better decisions and not suffered some poor luck. Firstly we should not have spent way more than half an hour trying fruitlessly to grab the Famine Skull. Secondly had the game not stuttered to a halt before throwing us out two thirds into the chapter and requiring us restart from the beginning (after more than two hours of play) we would likely have gotten further.

Pinball FX.
Lastly, I've been playing Pinball FX again. I like it because it's a game that allows you to come and go as you please. There are no long scripted missions that you can't walk away from until you reach an arbitrary check point or save location. It's simply an excellently put together pinball game. I say it allows you to walk away, in truth it doesn't. It is so packed to the bumpers with the magic of just-one-more-go that a new ball is being fired into the table as soon as the last of the previous game has disappeared from view.

Catching Up: GRID, HALO3, Penny Arcade, Dead Space

posted by Jaitu at 18:31

It's been a little while so here's a quick run down of what's been played in the meantime.
In no particular order.

Penny Arcade Adventures : On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness - Episode Two.
The adventure continues with Tycho and Gabe. Some (very) small tweaks to the controls improve the environment investigation. The story continues on a pace and the humour remains top PA fayre. I had a system crash during the final boss battle but other than that I enjoyed the second installment even more than the first.

Race Driver: GRID.
I haven't actually played this since almost the last post. I think I'm at the top tier of competition now. My only gripe, and it's a pathetic one that I have with all racing games of this nature, is that the rounds become increasingly long and include more races. This makes it harder to pick up and play for a quick gaming hit. I'm at the stage now where to complete a round involves maybe four races that each take ten minutes or more to finish.

HALO 3.
Techmaster and I managed to hook up online long enough to complete another two chapters on Legendary. I'm still peeved that you must complete the whole chapter in one sitting for it to count. We'll have to go back and run one again as despite having gone more than half-way through when we picked it up again from a checkpoint only about a third in the chapter wasn't marked as done when we finished it.

Dead Space.
I picked this up a month or so ago but found it almost impossible to play at the time. I was suffering from flu and the third person viewpoint gave me terrible motion sickness so I put it to one side (and played through Penny Arcade Adventures instead). Returning later I hit a bit of a choke point - I had decided to tackle it on the hardest setting from the get go - but once past that the game picked up some momentum and I've really been enjoying it.

Halo3: A Legendary Coalition On A Legendary Campaign

posted by Jaitu at 12:30

With the Locust hordes of Gears Of War conclusively defeated, at least
until GOW2 in November, TechMaster and Myself have move on to dealing
with the Covenant threat.
Playing the Halo3 campaign with a friend fighting alongside me changes
the dynamic of the game somewhat. My natural tendency towards cautious
progress sees me fall in to a supporting role which has so far gelled
nicely with the willingness of TechMaster to act as the pathfinder. In
this instance the role of pathfinder is almost exactly the same as that
of cannon fodder but he seems happy and his numerous and spectacular
deaths allow me to identify and hopefully dispatch the offending
Covenant aggressor.
We have agreed that we'll run through the campaign on the Legendary
difficulty and pickup the hidden Skulls as and when the game allows it.
Any that we miss or prove too much of a chore at this level we will
return for at a later date and with the resistance turned down again.

Halo3: First Play Complete

posted by Jaitu at 11:31

So that was Halo3.
Despite the almost non-existent depth of my emotional investment in this
game even I found the ending to be somewhat anticlimactic. It wasn't
just because I still had to go and replay a couple of areas again to
officially "complete" the game either. I went back, ran through the
allegedly missing missions and got the customary be-dunk for
achievements earned. As I've previously documented the lack of
connection I experienced with the story did not in anyway lessen the
enjoyment I got from playing through and I look forward to running the
Legendary co-op campaign path.
Unlike COD4, in which all achievements are from the solo campaign, Halo3
has a number of achievements that can only be gained through online
ranked match play. I don't know how many of these I'll bother going for.
The game has been around for a year now and it likely that most people
playing online will have been doing so for some time and as a result I
will get my arse handed to me. I think I'll experiment a little with the
online but not go all out for it.

Halo3: Gone Bye Bye

posted by Jaitu at 10:30

I've been playing Halo3 for a while now and enjoying it as much as I had expected. There's supposed to be some kind of grand story in there but either it's not very clear or I just stopped paying attention somewhere in the first game. To be honest I think it's both. The plot seems to be that someone wants to blow stuff up and we mustn't let them. To prevent them blowing stuff up we have to blow a load of stuff up. When a major blowing things up based victory is achieved we all celebrate until something important to us unexpectedly blows up and then we have to head of to blow something up. Ultimately we catch up with the guy who wants to blow stuff up and dispatch them only to find a former enemy who recently became an ally against the blowing-things-up guy is now a greater enemy than before. The only way to end this new and even more deadly than ever threat is to blow something up.
That's the point I'm at now.
Truthfully the plot doesn't matter to me. Just keep giving somewhere to run and something to gun.
One issue I have with the game is the way that save-games seem to be dealt with. On first loading the game for a session the main menu has an option to "Resume Solo Game" which will start you back where you last left off. While there are copious checkpoints during each level in each chapter unless you "Save and Quit" while playing you will generally only resume from the start of the last full level. I must not have saved the session before last as when I resumed I restarted about an hour and a half's worth of game play prior to where I was last. The frustrating thing is that you cannot continue the Solo game from anywhere you like within the areas that you have completed. You can pick and choose when launching a co-op campaign but this then overwrites your Solo progress leaving with just the option to start the Solo game from the very beginning once more. This was the position I found myself in last night. So as a result I am now playing the game as a co-op mission but on my own.
I think I must be somewhere near completion. I have seen the death of Truth and the rise once more of The Flood and am now embarking on the mission to detonate the partially constructed Halo.
Hopefully next time I play it'll be from that same place.

Halo 3

posted by Jaitu at 07:50

When the COD4 War Room once again became too much I decided to finally give Master Chief a run. Before now I had played a couple of hours of local multi player Halo3 with Womble692 and BigGayAl. The first thing to note is that although this is far from the best looking game on the 360 it does look a great deal better than the previous episode.
Taking my lead from Barney Stinson I went straight for the most difficult setting of Legen - wait for it - Dary. So after about five hours of incrementally picking my way past a ridiculous number of sniping Jackals I arrived at an early "War Room" scenario. Time and again I tried and failed to clear the motor pool of Brutes. The problem mostly being that I run short of ammunition and have to venture out of cover and into the battlefield to replenish. This invariably culminates in my explosive demise.
Talking this through with TechMaster he convinced me to run through the solo campaign on a Normal difficulty. The plan being for us to later tackle Legen - wait for it, and I hope you're not lactose-intolerant because the second half of this word is - Dary as a multi player co-op game. We employed a similar plan for Gears Of War. We should really finish that before getting too caught up in this.
So, after accepting my limitations and reducing the difficulty, I decided to restart the entire campaign from page one. Once I got out of the over-cautious habits that Legendary dictates I found myself back at the motor pool well within only an hour or so. A few short minutes later I found myself beyond the motor pool and running towards the barracks. There's no denying that the game is much-much-much easier now but no less enjoyable.